Interviews and Rationales

Why are very early-stage businesses overwhelmingly likely to fail a better place for a community-aware lawyer to put her effort than less immature businesses? Why, really, is "startup" a category? For investors, and for a certain kind of "solutionist" entrepreneur, one can see the attraction. But would you feel more effective if you were Elizabeth Holmes' lawyer at Theranos than if you represented an Ethiopian immigrant who has built from absolutely nothing a chain of dry cleaners around Washington DC?

It seems to me that the draft itself recapitulates that process of leaving the personal ostensibly behind. The riff on interviewing and Felix Cohen doesn't really need to be there anymore: it's taking space rather than shedding light. The center of the essay lies in the "how to be a startup lawyer" quandary. Which isn't really a quandary. Knowing how to get results, which is building your license, and knowing how to relate to people who help you find clients, which is building your network, are accessible skills: you can wonder less in the large and act more confidently in the local. Acquire the ability to get results for businesses: know from the inside what they require to deal with subject matter regulation, finance, labor law, immigration, real estate: some combination of the problems that all businesses deal with. Lay your networks among investors, if you want to represent the hamster-wheels for interesting people that VC call "startups." Meet bankers, public servants, real estate handlaers: all the sorts of people who affect through their decisions the destinies of businesses. Those are your network as well as the lawyers who have been doing things you want to do longer than you have. Worry less about how to do some particular kind of practice building, and more about acquiring the skills and experience that every practice-builder needs. Use law school intelligently. But you're at the beginning. So for now, write about how. Then come back in a couple of months and start doing it.